The first note split bone. A sound more blade than song. The Hollow Psalmists moved as one — robes whispering like torn wings, their arms raised in crooked unison. Ash lifted from the chapel floor, pulled into their mouths, their throats, their empty eyes. The hymn was no longer a prayer. It was a weapon.
Damon tore forward before the fire-circle could close, claws ripping into the stone like a beast unchained. Shadows followed him, sharper than steel, cutting down the nearest Psalmist with a howl that rattled the roof. But for each that fell, another rose. Their flesh unmade itself, hollowing, remaking in the Rite's rhythm. Every death was swallowed into the hymn — every strike, every scream, fed back into the ritual.
I wanted to run. I wanted to stay. The mark beneath my skin burned as if the hymn had found me, claimed me, written me into its verses. And then one of them turned its face toward me — no eyes, no mouth, only the hymn stitched across skin — and reached.
---
The air didn't ease after Damon's charge — it thickened. For every Psalmist torn apart by his claws, another rose from the ash, chanting with broken throats as if pain itself was the hymn. Their voices wove into the Rite, feeding the black fire crawling up the chapel walls.
Lucian loosed arrow after arrow, each one veined in ward-light, pinning corpses to the stone — but the bodies only twitched, shuddered, and clawed back up, mouths still singing. Mira danced beside him, blade a shimmer of steel, yet even her precision strikes ended in futility. She severed limbs that writhed back together, cut throats that refused silence.
Marlow and Veyra knelt at the edge of the circle, their twin glyphs burning bright — wards of unbinding meant to smother the Rite. But every verse the Psalmists belted bent those wards into cracks, the glyphs dimming under the weight of devotion. Sweat streaked Marlow's brow, his hand trembling as his sigils faltered.
Jareth was a storm at Damon's flank, his hammer smashing skulls like pottery. Still, the fragments pulled into shape, heads reforming as if death had no meaning here. His roars turned ragged, more despair than fury.
Dahlia stood frozen at the outer ring, the hymn under her skin gnawing louder with each cycle. She could feel it — the Rite wasn't summoning soldiers. It was using them as fuel, bleeding their deaths into endless resurrection, a chorus that could never break.
Damon staggered, crimson light slashing across his chest. His claws dripped but never slowed, rage making him relentless. Yet for every Psalmist he silenced, three more lifted their faces toward Dahlia. Their song wasn't aimed at him — it was hers they wanted. Hers the mark answered.
Lucian's bowstring snapped. Mira cursed as her blade caught in a reknit ribcage. Veyra cried out when her glyph burst in sparks, her wards collapsing. And in that unraveling, Dahlia finally understood — this fight wasn't meant to be won. It was meant to break them until someone gave in to the hymn.
---
The hymn tore wider, syllables twisting into a storm that made the marrow in my bones scream. The Colossal Knight reformed, it did not step from shadow—it was the shadow, bleeding form from absence, its helm crowned in a veil of ash that streamed upward like smoke from a corpse pyre. The iron sigils branded across its chest pulsed with the same rhythm as the Psalmists' song, each throb syncing with the cracks in my oath-mark.
It raised no blade at first. Its presence was the weapon, a gravity of dread that dragged breath from my lungs, that made even the thought of defiance treachery to my own flesh. My knees threatened collapse, not from weakness but from the command in that hymn. The Oath fought to hold me upright, but the deeper it locked, the more hollow it left me. I felt it—pieces of myself flaking away, embers scattered to the wind, swallowed by the chorus.
Dahlia screamed—not with her throat but with her blood. A black flare erupted from her veins, jagged arcs lashing at the Psalmists like living chains. One staggered, flesh boiling into cinder where her power struck. But another only sang louder, as if her defiance were a note they had been waiting to weave into their melody.
The Knight finally moved. One step. The earth fractured beneath its footfall, the ash glyphs swallowing the ground whole. Its hand unfurled from shadow, fingers like gauntlets carved from void. Not toward Dahlia. Not toward the Psalmists. Toward me.
The hymn carved deeper. I felt my own Oath unravel, threatening to collapse into the hollow echo they desired. Somewhere beneath the pressure, beneath the burning silence of marrow turning to ash, a choice began to claw free. Either I let the hymn consume me, or I burned deeper into the Oath, past its marrow, past even the meaning of my vow, until only ruin remained.
And still, Dahlia stood before me, chains of shadow lashing at a sea of voices she could not drown.
---
The hymn coiled tighter, threads of its verses burrowing into my marrow, promising the hollow peace of surrender. It told me I was only weight, a vessel to be emptied, a shadow to be erased. My oath bled under it, the fire guttering low, threatening to snuff itself against that cold choir.
I felt the choice gnaw at me. Let the hymn devour me whole, or burn what remained of myself to ash and claw free one last time. My oath pulsed faintly inside me, like a dying star begging to collapse. I did not hesitate. I pressed deeper. The burn was agony, the marrow of my bones cracking like dry wood. The Oath's brand scalded through skin, a crown of flame carved inward until I tasted iron. I fed it what little remained of me, every memory, every scrap of name, every tether to who I had been.
The hymn screamed back, furious, and the world split under the pressure.
Dahlia stood somewhere beyond the storm of it, her silhouette caught between the Psalmists and the Knight, the hymn's firelight clawing around her. Her hands moved in sigils sharp enough to cut the air, weaving a counter-harmony that bent the hymn's notes back against themselves. Her voice cracked with defiance, blood trailing from her lip, but she refused to fall silent. Every pulse of her will was a fracture in the song, each shatter buying me breath.
The Psalmists clawed toward her, eyes white with devotion, their tongues stretched in perfect chorus. She flung them back with flame pulled from marrow, but their hymn bled through her wards, gnawing her resolve raw. The Knight moved behind them, vast and relentless, its sword of shadow dragging furrows into the stone. The very walls bent as though bowing.
And in that ruin I saw her. Dahlia, back arched, arms lifted against a song that sought to drown her, her skin alight with sigils that should not have survived a mortal body. She stood against them for me, holding the hymn's weight on her shoulders, even as it stripped her breath to smoke.
I chose then. I burned.
The Oath seared the last fragments of hesitation from me, a conflagration so complete it no longer felt like fire but the marrow of the world unmaking itself. The hymn screamed as I flung it back with nothing but ruin, hollowing myself to answer hollow with flame. My flesh blistered, my vision caved inward, but still I pushed deeper into the pyre.
The Knight lifted its blade high. Dahlia's arms faltered, her wards buckling, the Psalmists lunging again with mouths torn wide. The hymn bent low, pressing us both beneath its tide.
And in that final instant before collapse, I felt it. A presence moving within the hymn itself—older, deeper, not Psalmist, not Knight. Something listening. Something waiting.
The Oath cracked wide.
Darkness folded. Flame and hymn and marrow all tore in half, and the world dropped into silence.
---
The silence tore louder than the hymn. It was not peace, not mercy, but the weight of something older, rawer, pressing against marrow and memory alike. The Psalmists froze mid-breath, throats locked, as if an unseen hand clutched them by the roots of their lungs. Their hymn collapsed into choking whispers, unfinished syllables dangling like corpses from a noose. The Knight's flame, once unyielding, sputtered as though smothered beneath a tide of ash.
Dahlia's blade trembled, not from fear but from recognition. Her brand seared, the runes along her wrist burning brighter than fire should allow, bleeding smoke that curled into symbols not of this world. She staggered, half in awe, half in torment, as the garden itself bent inward toward her skin.
And Damon—hollowed by the hymn, flayed by the Oath—saw it. Saw the void splitting in the space between her heartbeat and his own. From beneath her flesh, through cracks the Knight's flame had forced open, a light neither holy nor cursed began to drip. It was not illumination but the suggestion of one, as though the universe had been painted thin, and beneath its skin bled the language of the Ash Choir.
Glyphs slithered upward, marking her shoulder, her neck, etching into the air like living firebrands. They did not shine; they devoured. The Psalmists recoiled, hands over their mouths, eyes widening as their lungs tore against silence. The Knight staggered one step back, sword slackening, as if it too recognized the ruinous weight of that mark.
The Brand beneath her skin had awakened.
Dahlia lifted her head, her eyes now echoing with fractured light, her lips parting as though the Choir itself were about to borrow her voice. Damon felt his body pulled forward, tethered not to his Oath but to her—because in that moment, her existence burned louder than the vow carved into his soul.
The silence shuddered, preparing to fracture. And when it broke, the world would not remember its own name.
---
The Knight moved like a drawn shadow come to life, sword dragging sparks across the ground with each step. The Psalmists faltered in their hymn, sensing something they did not call, yet could not silence. Even the runes across the chapel walls dimmed, as if unwilling to shine in the presence of what now stirred.
Dahlia staggered, her blade dripping with black fire, her chest heaving as she fought to hold her ground against the swelling tide. Every strike she landed bled away too quickly, swallowed by the hymn's unseen grip. But she did not stop. Her eyes were wildfire—bright with defiance even as the psalm sought to suffocate every thought, every breath.
Damon fell to one knee, his oath burning through his veins, skin searing with cracks of molten light. The hymn pressed harder. He could hear them inside now, voices whispering like a thousand dead kings clawing through his skull. Hollow yourself, they sang. Hollow yourself until nothing remains but the vessel.
His vision blurred. The floor trembled. Dahlia's cry cut through the thunder as the Wraith Knight reached her, its great helm tilting as if studying her soul. The blade lifted, poised not just to kill but to erase. Damon reached, his hand trembling, sparks bleeding from his fingers.
He saw Dahlia's lips form his name. The moment froze.
The voices surged, shrieking into him, tearing through the oath until his heart felt split down the middle. To save her, he would have to let go. To let go meant the hollowing.
Something inside broke. He screamed—not aloud but inward, through every vein and bone—and the chapel cracked with him. The hymn faltered, shrill and warping, the Psalmists staggering as though the song had turned upon them. The Knight's helm snapped toward Damon, as if summoned by the fracture.
The silence came again, deeper this time. Not absence but negation. A silence so pure it devoured breath, thought, and sound. It fell like a veil across the chapel, pinning all movement in its grip. Dahlia froze mid-step, blade hovering an inch from the Knight's chest.
Then the shadows split open behind Damon. Not flame, not smoke—something older. A shape vast and crawling with chains, dragging itself from the unseen like a memory too ancient to die. Its voice was not heard but felt, pressed into every bone, every drop of blood.
You would burn for her, it whispered. Then burn.
Damon's eyes snapped open, pupils drowned in black fire. The oath no longer glowed—it screamed.
The Wraith Knight lowered its blade. The Psalmists fell to their knees. The chapel itself groaned as though something beneath its foundations had begun to stir awake.
Dahlia's voice finally tore through the silence, ragged and raw. Damon—what have you done?
The ground shattered. The hymn collapsed. The last light in the chapel was swallowed whole.
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The hymn's true face stirs. Will Damon survive the hollowing, or will Dahlia's last stand be crushed beneath the Knight's blade? Keep reading to find out what awakens in the silence beyond fire and hymn.